Google Is Building A New System That Will Make It Virtually Impossible To Find Child Porn On The Web

Google, the internet giant, is to create a global database of
child abuse images - which it will share with its rival companies
- in a bid to eradicate child pornography from the web.

The company disclosed to The Telegraph that its
engineers are working on new technology which will, for the first
time, allow internet search engines and other web firms to swap
information about images of children being raped and abused.

The new database, which is expected to be operational within a
year, will allow child porn images which have already been
“flagged” by child protection organisations such as the
Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to be wiped from the web in
one fell swoop.

Google is
also setting up a £1.27 million ($2 million) fund available to
independent software developers to produce new tools to combat
child pornography, it announced.

The company’s new projects were heralded by independent child
protection experts as important, game-changing developments in
the war against child pornography.

It comes after web search companies, including Google, have come
under intense political pressure to crack down on child porn.

Pressure on the web giants further intensified after it emerged
Mark Bridger, who murdered five year-old April Jones, and
Stuart Hazell, who murdered Tia Sharp, 12, were both found to
have accessed indecent images of children on the web.

The new system will work by sharing data on images which have
been identified as illegal and then flagged, or “hashed”, using
software originally created in 2008.

The lack of an industry standard means data on images earmarked
in this way is difficult to share, and therefore hard to
eradicate completely.

John Carr, a government adviser on child internet safety, said:
“This is an important moment. It should focus the minds of other
industry leaders in relation to how they are going to join the
fight.

“Google have stepped up. No one can argue about that. In all my
time working in this space no company has ever devoted anything
like this level of resources to working with civil society
organisations to attack online child abuse images.”

Susie Hargreaves, chief executive officer of the IWF, which is
part-funded by Google, said: “This announcement is inspiring for
those who are at the forefront of tackling child sexual abuse
content.

“We know that the best way to tackle what is some of the most
horrific content online is by working with others from all over
the world to combat this on a global platform.

“These funds, made available internationally, will no doubt allow
international experts to target images and videos of children
being sexually abused with the best technology based on the most
technically progressive ideas.”

David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said: “Since 2008,
we have used ‘hashing’ technology to tag known child sexual abuse
images, allowing us to identify duplicate images which may exist
elsewhere.

“Each offending image in effect gets a unique fingerprint that
our computers can recognize without humans having to view them
again.

“Recently, we have started working to incorporate these
fingerprints into a cross-industry database. This will enable
companies, law enforcement, and charities to better collaborate
on detecting and removing child abuse images.”